Apple’s HomePod Is a Good Smart Speaker. But the Mini Is Better for Most People.

The Apple HomePod is back. Nearly two years after discontinuing the original HomePod, Apple has resurrected the Siri-based smart speaker with minor improvements. Although the second-generation HomePod looks almost identical to the original, the formula was altered with some subtle design twists and new features, including temperature and humidity sensors, support for spatial audio , and integration of the new Matter smart-home protocol . For most people who favor Siri and HomeKit, these upgrades don’t make it a must-own speaker—the smaller, lower-priced HomePod mini is the better choice. But for music lovers, the new HomePod competes sonically with other popular smart speakers from Amazon and Sonos, even if it may be a matter of preference.

For music fans who are heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem, the HomePod (2nd generation) is Apple’s biggest, best-sounding smart speaker—a step up sonically from the HomePod mini. It is roughly three times larger than the Mini, incorporates five tweeters and a 4-inch woofer, and includes a large LED control screen on top, as well as a detachable power cord. It’s no surprise that the HomePod can play louder than the HomePod mini and deliver more bass, and in our tests, its sound quality was competitive with the best-sounding smart speakers we’ve tried. Through Siri voice control, you can play music from Apple Music and other linked streaming services, as well as your own iCloud-based music library. The speaker also supports room sensing (to automatically tailor the sound to your environment) and Atmos spatial audio (available on many tunes in Apple Music), and you can link two HomePods together to listen to music in stereo mode. For those who have embraced HomeKit as their smart-home platform of choice, the new HomePod and the HomePod mini are equally good control hubs, but the HomePod adds support for the new Matter smart-home protocol.

Unfortunately, the HomePod also has its share of potential downsides. Compared with smart speakers from Amazon and Google, the HomePod isn’t nearly as versatile or affordable. It’s three times more expensive than the Amazon Echo (4th Gen) and Google’s Nest Audio, and $100 more than the Amazon Echo Studio, which we preferred the sound of in our tests. The HomePod requires you to already be an Apple user to some degree—since you need either an iPhone or iPad to set it up. It lacks Bluetooth (which all Echo and Nest speakers have) or a line-audio input (which is featured on some Echo speakers) to connect external audio devices; AirPlay is the only way to stream external music sources to it. From a voice control and smart-home perspective, almost all the things we like about the $300 HomePod can be found in the $100 Mini, so its value is questionable.

But if you’re still on the fence about which HomePod (if either) you should buy, here’s a rundown of what the HomePod does well and what it doesn’t.